A Small Circus: A Novel

It is the summer of 1929, and in a small German town, a storm is brewing.

Tredup, a shabby reporter working for the Pomeranian Chronicle, leads a precarious existence . . . until he takes some photographs that offer him a chance to make a fortune.

While Tredup contemplates his next move, the town is buzzing. Farmers are plotting their revenge against greedy officials, a mysterious traveling salesman is stirring up trouble, and all the while, the Nazi party grows stronger as the Communists fight them in the street.

As the town slowly slips into chaos, Mayor “Fatty” Gareis does everything in his power to seek the easy life.

As tensions mount between workers and bosses, town and country, and Left and Right, alliances are broken, bribes are taken, and plots are hatched, until the tension spills over into violence.

From the brilliant mind of one of Germany’s most celebrated writers, A Small Circus is a genuine and frightening tale of small-town Germany during a time of unrest. It belongs in the collection of every reader who has enjoyed his break-out classics.

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Hans Fallada was born Rudolf Wilhelm Adolf Ditzen in 1893 in Greifswald, northeastern Germany, and took his pen name from a Brothers Grimm fairy tale. He spent much of his life in prison or in psychiatric care, yet produced some of the most significant German novels of the twentieth century, including Once a Jailbird; Little Man, What Now?; and Every Man Dies Alone, which was only published in English for the first time in 2009, to near-universal acclaim. He died in Berlin in 1947.

Michael Hofmann is a German-born poet and translator. He has translated such authors as Hans Fallada, Franz Kafka, Patrick Süskind, and many others, and has won numerous awards for his work. He lives in London, England.